Google Acquires ITA Software for $700 million

Google announced that it would acquire ITA Software, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based maker of “air-travel flight-information” software. Big airlines and travel agencies constitute the ITA’s customer base including American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Kayak, Orbitz, Southwest Airlines, TripAdvisor, United Airlines, US Airways, Virgin Atlantic Airways and Microsoft’s Bing. The company developed QPX technology to organize flight-related data such as flight times, flight availability and ticket prices.
Google will pay $700 million in cash to buy the software vendor. More than 500 employees work at ITA. The company has been a success in the online travel-information business and now it wants to improve by collaborating with Google. Google’s quality resources will help the company to further develop and enhance the quality of its “air-travel flight-information software”.
Google wants to buy the company because it wants to use its flight information software to make search easy for the Google users. It is a very crucial step as flight-information seeking users make a big portion of total Google searches. Similarly, on the airlines front, more than 50% of airlines sell their tickets online. However consumers are usually dissatisfied with the way they are referred from one site to another. So now Google intends to provide them information about the best available deals without their wasting time. Google’s VP of “Search Products & User Experience” explained Google’s new investment in a very nice way by saying, “Travel is one of the hardest search problems around, both in terms of how users like to express their queries and in terms of the data and accuracy and speed needed to get people the types of results they’re looking for.”